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A Different Type of Resume (Résumé)

The one thing that’s difficult to tell from a programmer’s résumé is “Can they actually code?” Sure, they may have had some coding jobs in the past, or have some schooling in programming, but that doesn’t tell you much about their actual skill. Or maybe they DON’T have the schooling or work experience, but have done tons of personal projects or worked in open source projects… a résumé might miss that talented coder. One of the things that I see a lot of tech people looking for recently is a Github account, and examples of coding or helping with open source projects, which is great.

As I thought about putting together a résumé, I wondered how can I demonstrate understanding of modern PHP concepts, without the hiring person needing to jump through a lot of hoops, or visit a bunch of sites. So I created a résumé in code, and got some useful tips from the Forrst community as well.

The goal was to make a resume that could be readable to a non-programmer. And I think if you look at it, you should be able to follow along:

$myResume->myName = “Terry Matula”;

$myResume->myEmail = “terrymatula-at-gmail-dot-com”;

$myResume->myPhone = “281-656-1474”;

// Places I’ve worked

$workExperience = array();

etc…

Even if you knew nothing about coding, that should make sense. And the great thing is, if you copy the file to a server and run it, it actually makes a somewhat nice looking résumé page.